Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Got it == flaunt it

It's December 29, and I'm still getting Christmas gifts! Well, I had to brag a little ...

Mozilla sent out their Firefox 4 Beta Team T-shirts today, with a thank-you card that says, "thanks for all your hard work! You rock!" Now, maybe that was for OverbiteFF, or Classilla, or being a pest on Bugzilla, and not your favourite and my favourite POWER ISA legacy Mac browser, but hey! free T-shirt! :-D

The nanojit has been up and running for a few days on my personal dev build and is pretty stable, but the results are currently mixed, and I'm going to do a full post on that when I have some hard numbers to present. The long and short of it is, for many tasks the nanojit is a screamer, but for certain tasks it is actually slower (because remember, the trace and emit step has overhead of its own, and any savings the JIT makes seem to be outweighed by that overhead under certain conditions). The argument is which benchmark to believe, but I'm still working on optimizations to the nanojit, it still seems to be an overall win, and even modulo my author bias I wouldn't go back to TenFourFox without it. Still, it's instructive to note how much optimization we take for granted out of our compilers and how much work we have to do to hand-optimize assembly, and hand-optimizing PowerPC assembly language is in fact exactly what I'm doing. Once I get to a stopping point, we'll observe what Mozilla does with beta 9 while I push Classilla 9.2.2 out the door since we're already tardy on its deadline.